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Free Will Primer

The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havocon our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who believe that free willand determinism are incompatibleit would mean that people are no more responsible fortheir actions than asteroids or planets. Anything would go.

--Dennis Overbye, The New York Times (2007)

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of

our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were

villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by

spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of

planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on--an admirable

evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star.

--William Shakespeare,King Lear (1610/2005)

The Free Will Debate: A Primer

Determinism: The metaphysical thesis that given the actual past and the laws of nature, there isonly one possible future.

Indeterminism: The metaphysical thesis that at any one momentholding constant the actualpast and the laws of naturethe future is genuinely open (i.e., there are multiple possibilities).

Fatalism: The metaphysical thesis that at any moment, everything is necessarily as it is.

Conditional vs. Unconditional Could Have Done Otherwise: On the conditional reading, to sayI could have done otherwise is to say I would have done otherwise had things been different. Onthe unconditional reading, to say I could have done otherwise is to say that I could have doneotherwise even if everything leading up to my decision remained constant.

Indeterminism and the Problem of Luck: If the universe is indeterministic, then the fact that anagent didxrather than y at t1 is ultimately a matter of luck.

Determinism and the Problem of Alternative Possibilities: If the universe is deterministic, thenagents do not have the unconditional power to do otherwise. Because free will and moralresponsibility require the unconditional power to do otherwise, determinism is incompatible

with free will and moral responsibility.

Incompatibilist Libertarianism: Determinism is incompatible with free will and determinism.However, determinism is false. So, humans have free will and moral responsibility.Incompatibilist libertarianism comes in two varieties: Agent causal accountsi.e., free willrequires a certain form of contra-causal agency (e.g., Chisholm)and event causal accountsi.e., free will requires there to be certain kinds of indeterministic events in the world (e.g., Kane).

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Incompatibilist Hard Determinism: Determinism is incompatible with free will anddeterminism. Moreover, because determinism is true, humans do not have free will and moralresponsibility (e.g., Pereboom).

Impossibilism: Free will and ultimate moral responsibility require us to be the ultimate sourceof our action. However, the kind of self-causation required for free will and moral responsibility

is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminismi.e., free will and moralresponsibility are impossible (e.g., Galen Strawson).

Soft Determinism: Free will and moral responsibility actually require the truth of determinism(e.g., Ayer and Stace).

Compatibilism: In general, compatibilists argue that humans could have free will and moralresponsibility even if determinism were true since the former do not require the unconditionalability to do otherwise, holding fixed the actual past and laws, nor the seemingly impossibleability to be ultimately responsible for what makes us the way we are. Instead, compatibilistsargue that free and responsible agency require the capacities involved in self-reflection andpractical deliberation. Different theorists emphasize different capacitiese.g., our ability to

identify with some of our desires over others (e.g., Frankfurt), to understand what is true andgood (e.g., Wolf), to be appropriate targets of reactive attitudes (e.g., indignation orapprobation) (e.g., Peter Strawson), or to be appropriately responsive to reasons (e.g., Fischer).

Semi-Compatibilism: Semi-compatibilists break up the debate about the compatibility ofdeterminism and free will and moral responsibility in two. Whereas some argue that moralresponsibility is compatible with determinism even if free will is not (e.g., Fischer), others claimthe oppositei.e., free will, but not moral responsibility, is compatible with determinism (e.g.,

Waller).

The Threat of Shrinking Agency: The view that recent developments in social psychology andneuroscience reveal that we either dont have free will and moral responsibility (e.g., the

epiphenomenalism of Wegner and Libet and the physicalism/reductionism of Greene andCohen) or that we have far less agency and moral responsibility than we traditionally assumed(e.g., the situationism of Doris and the automaticity of Bargh).

Illusionism vs. Disillusionism: The illusionist is an incompatibilist non-realist who thinks thateven though free will and moral responsibility are illusions, they are positive illusions that yieldintrapersonal and interpersonal benefits and hence our beliefs in free will and moralresponsibility ought to be preserved (e.g., Smilansky). The disillusionist, on the other hand,thinks that free will and moral responsibility are illusory and our belief in them is detrimentaland should be abandoned (e.g., Nadelhoffer). This debate is ultimately an empirical and policy-centric debate about what we should do if it turns out we decide humans dont have free will andmoral responsibility.